For nearly 50 years, vast numbers of American children have come to know the lines: "The sun did not shine. / It was too wet to play. / So we sat in the house / All that cold, cold, wet day."

In Britain, not so many people will recognise them. They first appeared in 1957 as the opening lines of The Cat in the Hat by "Dr Seuss". It was a book that changed him from being an author into an American institution. Not that it was the first time that this author, Theodor Seuss Geisel, had become an institution. Anyone old enough can remember a predecessor to spray-cans: a peculiar apparatus called "the Flit". It combined a bicycle pump with a can that you filled with insecticide. The man who came up with the slogan that sold these by the trillion - "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" - was Geisel. By using the pseudonym of Dr Seuss, though, Geisel was able to do what very few children's authors manage: to imply that he had a life beyond the writing of books for children.

It began in March 1904, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Followers of The Simpsons will experience a jolt on hearing this, and indeed the creator of that similarly vast American cult, Matt Groening, has said that Dr Seuss was an inspiration to him. Springfield was a good place for European immigrants. Geisel's grandfather came from Baden in Germany and by the 1880s was flogging beer and running a row of stables full of grand horses and wagons. Both he and his son married German women, which meant - importantly - that Dr Seuss was brought up bilingual.

For the thousands of Germans in America, and particularly for people like Grandfather Geisel who had fought in the Prussian cavalry, the first world war was a difficult time. Everything from verbal abuse to violence was aimed at people we would call German-Americans; sauerkraut was renamed liberty cabbage and frankfurters became hot dogs. Outsiders, like the Geisels, could not escape the effects of anti-German propaganda. "When the Star-Belly Sneetches had frankfurter roasts / Or picnics or parties or marshmallow toasts, / They never invited the Plain-Belly Sneetches." ( The Sneetches , 1961.)

British adults coming across Seuss books might easily assume that the person behind the work must be some kind of wisecracking clown. When I first encountered them in the 1970s, to make the rhythms and riot work I assumed the voices of Groucho Marx and WC Fields. When the comedian Greg Proops read The Cat in the Hat in a radio programme, he made the cat Sgt Bilko: "'Look at me! / Look at me now!' said the cat. / 'With a cup and a cake / On the top of my hat.'"

Though Geisel served time in the Hollywood saltmines, his route was not via vaudeville. He joined America's elite by studying at Dartmouth College and Oxford University, followed by a fairly grand tour of Europe, none of which got him a degree. Instead, it took him, with his girlfriend and wife-to-be, to Manhattan and a prosperous life as a newspaper and ads cartoonist. On a trip home from abroad in 1936, Geisel listened to the rhythm of the boat's engine: a jazzy mix of anapaests and iambs (da-da DUMs and da-DUMs) which he married to an autobiographical thought from his first home: "And that is a story that no one can beat, and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street." It took a further six months to write and illustrate, and after 27 publishers' rejections and a meeting with an old pal from Dartmouth it appeared as And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937).

Quite why the childless flneur chose children's literature is not clear. He had done little more than pen a few scurrilous rhymes and illustrate an alphabet and a kids' joke book. Mulberry Street did well, as did a prose story, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. The Seven Lady Godivas (not for children) flopped, and a children's book, The King's Stilts, didn't do much better. The breakthrough came in 1940 with Horton Hatches the Egg, a verse fantasy about an elephant who looks after an egg left by a bird who would rather holiday in Palm Beach.

During the war, Seuss cartooned for a liberal newspaper and worked for Frank Capra, coming up with storylines to educate the non-reading GI. By 1947 he was back on children's books, and over the next 10 years he produced a series of verse fantasies, including the wonderful On Beyond Zebra, a Seussian 20-letter alphabet. The trigger that launched The Cat in the Hat, though, was a book called Why Johnny Can't Read by Rudolf Fleisch, who argued that TV and comics were the enemy of children's reading. The novelist John Hersey argued in Life magazine that the typical school primer was an "antiseptic little sugar-book", and asked why such books shouldn't be written by people like Dr Seuss or Walt Disney.

This was enough to set Geisel's publishers thinking. They fed him a word-list (some say it was 225 words long) and told him to come up with something. The result was one of the world's top-selling books, and now a Mike Myers movie. It is licensed anarchy, a cat wreaking havoc in the house of two bored children, while mother (no father is in evidence) is out. There are signs of anarchy in the verse, too: metrically speaking, it's Gerard Manley Hopkins doing bebop.

For the next 33 years an array of Dr Seuss books appeared, ranging across rhyme-play, inventive nonsense and serious ness. Behind the fun and fandango it's possible to detect an old-fashioned wish to make children better: to encourage them to avoid picking on people because they're different or weaker and to discourage them from thinking that it's OK to say or think that you're superior to someone else.

Many of the books succeed because they represent a response to language that coincides with a young child's discovery of the pluck and knock of words. I've just read Green Eggs and Ham to my three-year-old and an hour later I heard her muttering: "That Sam-I-am! That Sam-I-am! I do not like that Sam-I-am!" At the age of 80, with Reagan flying high, Geisel even tackled what he saw as the symmetrical idiocies of the cold war in The Butter Battle Book.

It's difficult to say why Seuss books haven't become quite the cult here that they are in the US. Perhaps it's the comic-book quality of the drawings or the fronting up of something moral in the midst of the lunacy; our nursery rhyme tradition is bereft of this tone. Even so, Ted Geisel, who died in 1991, has been a fixture in many British children's lives. Groening told us that he was probably the most subversive person he ever read, if only because he taught kids that it was OK "to hop on top of Pop".

Michael Rosen's two volumes of verse memoir, Carrying the Elephant and This Is Not My Nose, are published by Penguin. Visit www.guardian.co.uk/books/quiz for a Dr Seuss quiz.